Sunday, July 24, 2011

There’s an element of slavish worship to any superhero myth, but that’s particularly true for Captain America, a WWII-era propaganda comic that took a sickly young man who just really wanted to fight those damn Nazis and made him into thepinnacle of the American ideal — which is, of course, a ‘roided up war-machine in a red-white-and-blue lycra suit. Now, because interminable, ambiguous wars with no clear objective are for pussies, we are privileged to welcome back the Cap’n into our popular consciousness equipped with Adolf Hitler as his foil — every hero needs a villain, after all, and plus, comic-book-origin flicks are totally hot right now with nostalgic Gen-Xers, all of whom are expected to walk out of theaters and immediately vote Republican.

It’s hard to argue that, like pretty much every cinematic effort Marvel has been cranking out for the last decade or so, Captain America: The First Avenger looks like a pretty engaging flick. But it’s also hard to argue that it lays on the nationalism pretty thick — the “new breed of super-soldier” thing actually comes off pretty sinister within the context of the ensuing years of American warfare. But then again, Captain America is not exactly inviting us to consider the context, either.READ MORE